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If
you're a child of the late 1970s or early 1980s, you likely grew up with at
least some level of interest in video games. Even if you're not, gaming has
become fairly ubiquitous over the past twenty-plus years, catalyzed by the
birth of dedicated gaming consoles like the Atari and the Nintendo
Entertainment System. While a lot of gaming today is still centered around
these systems, it also permeates across other technologies, such as the Web and
smartphones. The allure of gaming is that you are presented with a challenge
and rewarded for overcoming that challenge. Sometimes you finish one level and
your reward is to move onto the next; maybe you stumble upon a secret area that
gives you a "power-up"; you may defeat your nemesis and win the entire game.

As video
gaming has become more engrained in U.S. culture, its core concepts are being
used for applications that are entirely untethered to video games themselves.
This application of game design or game mechanics in non-game contexts is
called "gamification", and you can expect to see a lot more of it crop up in
the Web and mobile applications that you use.

It
makes sense that gaming is being used in a broader context these days. One only
has to look at social gaming powerhouse Zynga, which makes addictive,
Facebook-integrated games (like FarmVille and Words with Friends) to see how
popular gaming has become to the general populous. The company claims 240
million active users, leveraging the power of relationships on Facebook to
promote its use. While Zynga develops actual games, its popularity has driven
more comfort and acceptance of using game theory in entirely new ways.

One
of the earliest and most prominent users of game mechanics was location-based
mobile app Foursquare. Foursquare uses badges, points and leader boards to
generate competition among friends, and add "stickiness" to its app, making
users want to use it again and again. Did you check in to five restaurants with
a photo booth? There's a badge for that. Did you check into a place where 50 or
more people are also checked in at? That place is "swarming" and you get a
badge and extra points. This
underlying gaming system keeps people engaged with Foursquare and makes them
want to use it again and again.

Gamification
is being adopted increasingly by marketers and advertisers to keep their
audiences engaged longer, and also to deliver a more valuable experience
overall. Brands that have adopted gamification concepts in the recent past
include Coca-Cola, Dell, Nike, Pepsi and Viacom. Recently, automaker Ford
launched a gamification campaign in conjunction with the launch of its TV
show, "Escape Routes". Each team
on the TV series has their own social page that users can interact with in
real-time, and those users can earn points to win lucrative prizes (Ford
Escape, vacations, and other goodies) by interacting and inviting friends to
play. For Ford, it means that its audience can engage with its brand in a much
more intimate, long-term way than ever before, and the game mechanics behind
its campaign drive that usage.

We've
come a long way from Pac Man and Donkey Kong, but the core concepts found
in those decades-old games are alive and well in gamification today. By
providing the proverbial carrot on a stick through levels, badges and points,
audiences can be enticed to stick around for a while and engage like they never
have before, providing value to that audience, as well as the brand.